by Helen Slavin
And how cruel I was. How desperate and thoughtless. My Mother had liked Sam and so I stuck with him. I grieved hard, crying on his shoulder so that mould grew on his smart car-salesman jackets. I moved out of my place, my horrid house that seemed like the gateway to Hell, the house my Evan had vanished from. The house My Mother had popped into that morning on her way to go to Our Bank.
I ran away like the coward I am. The coward I was.
My escape hatch was Sam’s house. A cramped little dolly house with chrome furniture that I had no feeling for at all. I hated the kitchen and its yellow cupboard doors. I felt claustrophobic in the bedroom with its white-fitted wardrobes, boxing me into the bed, banging my knees on the wall every morning that I got up. I suffered the bathroom where your elbows knocked against the washbasin when you made to wipe your bum.
It was not Home. It was a Hiding Place. By accident I made Sam happy. A fake happy. A lie, an untruth. A fairy story.
I was the wicked fairy. I cast a spell. Spells break.
I don’t know what the change was. It was one of those stages of grief I suppose, my grief for My Mother caught up with my grief for Evan. I was walking home to the dolly house one evening after quite a hard day at The Glade. Sam had offered to pick me up but I enjoyed the walk to Dollyville.
It was quite a shock that afternoon, to be on the phone to Sam and hear his familiar, safe-as-a-castle voice and realise that yes, actually, I had found something that I enjoyed. I could feel pleasure. Immediate twinge of guilt that I could still feel this when really I should be wallowing in desperation. I waited to see if My Mother would come back at that moment to tick me off. She was not a woman to wallow in desperation any day of her life.
So I walked back. It was lighter, heading towards May, official Summer Time. The trees were coming into leaf, buds around, that green whiff that comes with the edge of the frost as it zaps everything into action. We had had a sunny afternoon, chill in the shade but baking and golden in the sunlight. Outside The Glade the weathered wooden tables all smelt fresh and woody, releasing the scents of the two summers they had sat out there. I felt weathered myself under my sweatshirt now, my skin warming as I walked.
There was an avenue leading through the trees from The Glade. It wound round in a slight curl so that although you knew the road to town was there, you couldn’t see it. I walked along listening to the birds, a great tit insistent in the treetops. I could hear the squirrels fighting. Once or twice I met a dog and its owner, people escaping from the edges of work, letting themselves free in the forest.
I moved across the gravel of the carpark and out onto the road. I walked along, keeping ahead of the traffic which jammed for the lights at the far junction. I jammed it further when I used the crossing lights.
I walked on, further into town, cutting down now through the Old Mill area of rows of Victorian houses. The kind of two-up, two-down that the estate agents like to call cottages. There were front yards here made into lush gardens, clematis climbing, twining with ivies along rose arches and up obelisks. One or two people had turned their space into a scrap yard, bent prams and motorbikes. There was a gnome haven, hideously coloured.
I kept on until I reached the hornbeam-hedged alleyway that cut through to the allotments on Whitworth Lane. There he was again, Sir Charles, haunting the town he had been so responsible for.
It was as I moved out into the patchwork of blue sheds and black compost bins that I realised I felt at home here. There was an ambitious polytunnel and a greenhouse or two, bamboo canes ready for runner beans, early potatoes, a man digging a trench for his sweet peas, a cast out cottage-style sofa with a coffee table and two old gents sitting in it, drinking tea.
If anyone can be blamed, or named as correspondents, I suppose it might be Mr Jellico and Mr Anstey. They spotted me as I paused behind the chain-link perimeter fence to take in the full view of the Whitworth Lane allotments. I was having a strange moment, whether it was revelation or the muggy afternoon temperature I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. Either way the sky was filling with prickling black stars and the scent of rich, sweet rot from compost heaps. I reached out for the chain link, reaching through, to try and get in there. To be safe.
Mr Jellico put the kettle on their camping stove as Mr Anstey came to rescue me.
I sat on the sofa, in the warm spot vacated by Mr Jellico. He opened out a deckchair and a parasol as Mr Anstey poured the tea.
‘It’s a muggy old day…’
‘…and a longish walk,’ they said. They assimilated me into their world with ease. They talked as if I spent every afternoon sitting on their sofa.
‘How’s tricks up at The Glade then?’ Mr Anstey asked. We chatted then about the day, how a party of old ladies from the bowling club had descended like locusts, emptying the cool cabinet of Genoese fancies and Barm Brack.
‘Your mother always made wonderful Barm Brack. Did she use a special brew of tea to soak the fruit?’
Mr Jellico eyed his friend warningly as if I might rant with grief at any moment. Instead I thought of My Mother steeping the sultanas and raisins in a vast bowl filled with tea.
‘No. Just Typhoo. Only she always put it into hot tea. She was always too impatient to wait for it to cool.’
Before long we were talking about the mysteries of Valerie’s rock buns. When it grew dark they lit camping lanterns and offered cardigans. The kind with latticed leather buttons.
I had a sort of affair with Mr Anstey and Mr Jellico. Instead of heading home to Sam I sat on the sofa with Mr Anstey and Mr Jellico. I relished their easy company, their army tales, their gardening tips. It was my pocket of delight. There were no pockets of delight in Sam’s house. Just banged elbows and boxes. The chairs were box shaped. The sofa. The television. Sam even called it The Box. It began to box me in.
I drank some tea. Good tea.
‘Where do you live then? You still live at your mum’s old place?’ Mr Anstey asked one evening.
‘Dollyville,’ I said without thinking. They knew where I meant.
‘Out Barncroft Meadows? Or the other place…’
‘Burrow Hills,’ I said. The marketing people had a field day thinking up names for Dollyville and Toytown. In recent times, as the toytown developers have spread their houses over the green belt, they have become even more fantastical, as if the cramped little prison camps that they call housing estates are ‘villages’ or ‘rural towns’. They have street names from Watership Down or The Lord of the Rings. Badger Levels, Bilbo Bend, The Stride.
There is a huge development down at the dockside where once, and only once, a shipment of slaves were housed in a warehouse that was built to store wool and cotton bales. You can guess how I know about the slaves. I have seen them. The place should be called Unfinished Business. Instead some happy marketing chappy called it Donovan’s Wharf, after a misremembered John Wayne film.
We made a good living at The Glade. We had even been approached by the Donovan’s Wharf development asking if we would be interested in opening up a branch down there. It was Sam’s idea to make it a franchise. They could buy the rights to have a Donovan’s Glade tea room down at the wharfside and pay us a fee for doing so.
We sold the franchise to a young couple who lived in Dobbin Drive in a semi with pillars at the door. All the houses on Dobbin Drive had pillars at the door, great Ionic columns with poky-looking UPVC doors between. Dobbin Drive was a favoured location.
It was Mr Anstey who got me onto the waiting list for the allotments. Sam bought me leather gauntlets for gardening and a coffee table book on the Vegetable Year. We had no idea that the allotments would be my chance to dig a tunnel. Out of here.
May, the fifth. And also the second
IT TOOK a year on the waiting list, but I obtained an allotment. The two people before me died just before their names came up so I jumped ahead, by a rather ironic default I thought.
The two visited me with advice about what they had planned. I decided that I would compro
mise and put in what they had both planned. Therefore, I erected a shed for Mrs Branch and dug in organic matter for a crop of early potatoes in honour of Mr Beech.
Mrs Branch had clearly had a premonition about me or else had plans for my future. She was so pernickety about the shed. It had to be this size and have those windows and that door and exactly the right pitch to the roof. After searching around I eventually found something she approved of. Uncannily, once it was erected on the allotted allotment, it looked like home. Even when it was empty save for my new spade and fork (gifts from Mr Anstey and Mr Jellico) I preferred to be there. Smelling the new wood.
Over a period of about three months I filled the shed with an array of junk furniture and an antique Swedish wood-burning stove. All very domestic. Mr Jellico and Mr Anstey had high hopes of another Glade branch. Instead, I made the shed my home. It was not very gradual and not really an unconscious event. I felt safe there. Cosy. Warm. My little stove and my enamel pans.
My diet changed again, to boiled eggs and beans and soups and once I got the hang of it I ventured into small casseroles and stews, one-pot delights that I ate sitting in the shed doorway, straight from the pan. Until, that is, I was passing the charity shop and I noticed a beautiful cutlery set in the window complete with enamel cup and plate.
I was a bower bird. I slept in a steamer chair rolled up in an old bedspread that someone had once taken a lot of care to embroider. It had found its way to the charity shop and thence, via a ten pound note, into my shed.
Sam’s home now seemed to him like a vacant palace. His feet echoed around the empty kitchen. The bed, apparently, was too big without me. I didn’t intend to be mean but as Sam sat in my shed on a French folding garden chair painted celadon green I felt that everything he said seemed to have come from a pop song.
I don’t know what I wanted him to say.
There I go again, lying. I wanted him to say goodbye, to arrive with a bag of my belongings and to leave me to it, with my view across the carrot tops and the broad beans. Instead Sam arrived with an engagement ring.
‘I want you to marry me,’ he said, opening the little jeweller’s box. Another box. The ring, a huge chunk of cubic zirconia. I think cubic zirconia tells you all you need to know about Sam.
What did I want from him? I didn’t really want diamonds or gold. I wanted something more precious. I don’t know why he loved me. He felt he deserved me, that I was his because he had chosen me, not because lightning had struck. I was like a DVD player to him, a state of the art girlfriend.
But as I have said, I didn’t mean to break his heart. I was living in a shed on the allotments. I think myself that the clues were there for him.
‘Did you hear me? I want you to marry me.’
I was panicking then. I was so weak and feeble that I knew if something major didn’t turn up in the next five minutes then I would most likely marry Sam simply for want of a way out. It was like a vast metal man-trap opening up. And then I remembered Evan. Evan Bees saved me.
‘I can’t marry you Sam. I’m still married to Evan.’
‘He isn’t coming back. I thought you would have worked that out by now.’ He smiled edgily, already knowing that he was on a loser here, but his salesman instinct unwilling to give up on that last chance of a sale.
‘He’s declared legally dead after seven years. It’s only been five.’
‘I don’t want to wait two more years. I don’t. We should get married now.’
I could see that he was as desperate to marry me and catch me as I was not to marry him and escape. It meant exactly the same to both of us. Finally I had the answer.
‘I don’t want to wait two years either.’ I said it flatly and he caught my meaning instantly.
Two days later he arrived with my bag of belongings. Most of which ended up in the charity shops of the town. I pared down everything I possessed to what I needed, what I loved and what would fit in the shed.
June, the sixth. The third
THE COUNCIL found out that I was living in the shed or, to quote their letter, had ‘appropriated the allotment building as my primary domicile’. This was outside the bounds of the allotment agreements and I was going to be turfed out. No pun intended. I had a visit from a couple of councillors and a social worker.
‘Always fancied an allotment myself,’ said the moustachioed councillor, the Tory, ‘but I play golf.’ As if that somehow discounted having an allotment.
‘My wife does our garden. And the kids won’t eat vegetables anyway. Can’t see the point in growing your own when you can get perfectly good stuff from the supermarket.’
And the social worker, a woman with a huge leather satchel, sat and drank tea and looked out of the window at the sweet peas. She smiled at me once or twice, a contented smile and she said absolutely nothing. The two councillors offered apologies but admitted that there was nothing they could do. Rules are rules and not made to be broken.
‘We’ve had a lot of trouble with the travelling families over on the FastMart carpark, you might remember they were burning effigies of the mayor last month?…Well, anyway, we can’t have you setting a precedent by living here.’
There was a newspaper photographer who just happened to be passing and we all posed for a jolly photo. The next day the social worker with the big satchel came back and asked if she could have tea. Atalanta, her name was. She brought homemade scones, scones which were so good I asked her for the recipe so we could serve them at The Glade. Shortly after, she gave up social working and opted to be assistant manager at The Glade.
I had to find somewhere to live. My first thought was that I would up sticks back to The Glade. It was another shed after all, and I felt at home there. However, that was going to cause more problems, not just for me but for the Giant, Brian.
He had grown a beard after My Mother’s death and he looked even more like a giant with it. I saw him now and again as he went about his forestry business. He went back to Nature, because she welcomed him with open branches. In the forest, in the moonlight, he would wander naked amongst the beech and the ash.
I saw him once or twice, as I worked late at The Glade, my head drowsing over the books or waiting for a fruitcake to come out of the oven. I was always doing that, starting fruitcakes too late in the day, waiting up until the early hours for them to be cooked. Those witching-hour fruitcakes always tasted the best, though.
I would see Brian step out from his cabin. He was quite a hairy chap, hairy in a welcoming, attractive way, not at all reminiscent of Mr Dauntsey and his wolf pelt. Brian reminded me of someone in a fairy story who is under a spell to spend their nights as a forest creature. A man fox.
I should have helped Brian I suppose, but there was nothing to be said and somehow, on the nights when I saw him heading out into the nightness I didn’t feel he needed helping. For all I know it was something he did with My Mother and he was simply keeping on the tradition. Possibly he met up with her in the moonlight and they were together.
He looked at ease, if not happy exactly. Happy is overrated. It is like the giddy cousin, laughing too hard and too long. It is better to be simply at ease.
In the Land of the Giant, Brian: forest
It’s rare I venture beyond the fences now. I have my territory and I guard it. I watch the tourists and their children carefully. I allow them in and I watch over them. they are safe here. Some come with fires, trailing caravans or pitching tents. Curled up in the underbrush like the ancients.
I have an idea to save up and buy the forest from the Trust. It’s my scheme for my retirement. I don’t imagine they would let me stay on after otherwise. They will bring in a new forester then. They have already started sending over trainees.
Mark, who has no feeling for trees. He wears his badges and talks of management. He ought to work at the timberyard. He trips over roots. Gets himself lost walking from the information centre to the Crackett Path. There was James, who poached the fish.
They don’t know any
thing. They walk through without looking up or around. They look at a hedgerow and they don’t see the birds or the insects there.
I’m afraid to go out. Let me be honest. I am afraid that something will happen. Not just what happened to my Maddie. I don’t know if I’m afraid of dying. It might mean we’d be together. But it might mean nothing. The end. Compost.
No. I’m afraid that I might meet someone else and start the process of moving on. They all say you have to move on. You have to keep going. Life goes on. But I know if I do that there is some leaving behind to be done. She is left where she is and she is further away from me still.
I am staying here. As close as I can be. My territory.
Options
MY OPTION, and Sam kept this option very open, positively wedged it open with a brick, was to head back to Sam’s until I found somewhere. Sam’s theory, I know, was that I simply wouldn’t find anywhere. I was just too…sluggardly. Too disorganised. We would fall back into our lovely routine. He offered to store my junk, his term for it, in his garage. I think Bonfire Night was going to be his deadline. Incinerate the evidence of my freedom.
Whatever, I didn’t go back to Sam’s. I packed ‘my junk’ into some boxes which were stored at The Glade. Then Atalanta offered me room in her flat. It was the top floor of a three-storey Georgian house. There were several rows in Old Town, down by the Zion Chapel which had stood there since 1810. Atalanta did not want anything other than to help. I had helped her make a career move, she wanted to return the favour.
I loved Zion Chapel and the minister who had preached there. He had a lot to say and I would listen. I didn’t ask why he wasn’t heading straight to God instead of spending two hundred years loitering in Zion Chapel. It seemed churlish. When he stood in the pulpit he seemed already to be in Heaven.